The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF

NoSun writes "Sun's latest project is to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf, that would replace Fontconfig and Xft2. But the big question is: Does the world need yet another X font library that would create more incompatibility and fragmentation? Well known Gnome and GTK+ developers are against this (yet another) X font library which just re-invents the wheel one more time with the result of slowing down KDE and Gnome in the desktop race. "

Comments

Ironic...

[duffbeer703]

Is it just me, or is it somewhat amusing that the authors of a bloated CORBA graphics framework like GNOME are complaining about re-inventing the wheel or performance sacrifices?

Wasn't the GNOME project the outraged response of the GNU crowd to KDE?

The one thing that all large open-source projects have in common is a bunch of prima donnas running the show.

The crappiest thing in OSS.

[Qbertino]

OSS 0\/\/nZ.
Better OSes. Better Servers. Better Appservers. Better SSI technologies. Better architecture. Better Desktops. Better in the sense of: Faster, cheaper, more transparent and 'future safe' in ways proprietary can only dream of. There's no doubt.
Yet there's one thing that has a 100% penetration suckage that is only compareable to the worst of commercial software (like Director or Outlook) and that is:
Fonts in X.
The people who built the first Motif Font architecture didn't no squat what they where doing, even messured on a pixelfont level. They might as well should have sticked to console. We'd be better of today without it!
The whole current setup that just barely manages, made up of a bazzilion tidbits from xft ftx sftsxftftxsxstfts bitstreams ftfi (praise them!!!), motif *shatonscreen* pixelfonts, KDEs fontrendering (finally from engineers with more than just a spinal column to think with - Hooray!) and whatnot is so utterly bizzare it makes MS fdisk look like the reference in usability and software design.

I tell you, whatever anybody does, be it uncrapping the given system (it gives me the creeps just thinking of it) or 'reinventing the wheel' (I don't think you can reinvent a pile of shit) it can't make anything worse.
So actually I'm quite thankfull for the attempt and whish Sun good look and strong nerves. They need it.